The tenor Joseph Calleja tells Ivan Hewett why creating a choir back in
Malta is taking priority over all else.

It’s a blazing, sleepy July afternoon in Valetta, Malta’s ancient capital. Not much is moving, apart from the lizards darting in the flowerbeds. But in the converted church that is now the Robert Sammut Hall, it’s all fevered activity. Malta’s most famous son, tenor Joseph Calleja, is here to rehearse for his annual summer concert, which is a red-letter day in the island’s cultural calendar.

Film crews and a journalist from the Times of Malta jostle for his attention. After a while, about 200 excitable children arrive, and Calleja — who until then had seemed somewhat tense — relaxes and beams. Then the orchestra plays a swirlingly romantic phrase, and suddenly the children burst into song.

The next day, over lunch, Calleja reveals that this choir (the HSBC Children’s Choir) is his pride and joy. “It was an idea of Anton and me,” he says (Anton Attard is a friend and promoter of the Valetta concert). “We were thinking of ways to get more people interested in classical music and thought, well why not form a choir from families across the whole island?

“Think of the domino effect of all the mamas and papas and sisters and aunties. It would touch practically the whole population.”

We’re in a fish restaurant on the far side of the main island, a 30-minute drive from Valetta. It’s a family business, and everyone, from the delivery man to the stout elderly gentlemen sipping their brandies, seems to know Joseph. But then everybody knows everybody on this little island, so the idea that a choir could galvanise an entire population into a love of classical music doesn’t seem so unlikely.

It turns out that singing in a choir was what brought the young Calleja into music. “I remember the monks taught us some Gregorian chant, and that really opened my ears. It was so different to the folk songs I was singing.” Before long, pop became his passion, and soon he was thrashing out songs in lock-up garages with friends, like millions of adolescents around the globe.

Then, aged 14, Calleja had the epiphany that would change his life. “I saw a movie starring Mario Lanza,” he says, “And I thought, that’s the most beautiful sound in the world, I want to imitate it. A few months later, I was staying with my aunt in York – I have some English relatives and I often had holidays in Yorkshire and the Lake District. Well, she had a CD of tenor songs, I remember it was called the Essential Pavarotti Volume 2.

“I was singing along to this, and she came running upstairs to my room and said, 'My God, Joseph, that’s a really amazing voice you have.’ I knew then that singing was what I had to do, but I didn’t know how to make this dream a reality.”

Fortunately, help was at hand, in the shape of the elderly and once-famous Maltese tenor Paul Asciak. “He had a really fine career in England in the 1950s with Sadlers Wells and the Carl Rosa company,” says Calleja. “After he retired, he became a singing teacher here in Malta. I went to sing for him, and I remember he said nothing, he just raised his glasses and looked at me in a strange way. I thought, either I’m really terrible or really good.”

Of course, it was the latter. Calleja had just turned 15, and for the next four years he led an austere life, working on his singing with Asciak at every spare moment.

“I wasn’t singing much, my voice wasn’t ready. We listened to dozens of recordings, did breathing exercises, and I learnt about the physiology of the voice and also about style.”

It was very different to the hurly-burly of the conservatoire opera schools where most singers learn, but Callaja considers himself lucky. “I think it saved me because I was quite a naughty boy when I was young.” How naughty?

“Well, when I was 14, I went to a rehearsal with a bottle of wine which I swigged from, because I saw Mario Lanza do that in a film. That didn’t go down too well,” he laughs.

But when he reached his 19th year, Calleja rebelled. “There came a point where I said, 'I’ve had enough of this, I want to work’, and Paul was saying 'You’re not ready’. But how does a bird learn to fly except by flying? So I packed myself a duffle-bag and set off to Germany for three auditions.”

They were the only auditions Calleja has ever given. Once that golden tenor voice had been heard, opera houses and agents were beating a path to his door. By the time he was 24, he’d made his debut at both Covent Garden and the New York Met. He’s now among the handful of serious singers who can reach out to a huge general audience, singing alongside pop singers such as Ronan Keating and Dionne Warwick.

The rise seems effortless – which Calleja puts down to his meticulous training. “Making the voice equal across all the registers is the most important thing, and that’s something I worked hard to achieve. There are many different expressive colours a singer can give to a note, but only one good technique for making those colours.”

Calleja may have been impatient at 19, but now he’s reached the ripe old age of 34 he’s biding his time. “I’m careful to sing only roles that suit me. I don’t want to be one of those singers that burns out in their forties. I’m lucky my voice is darkening slowly of its own accord, and in a few years I should be able to do big roles in Pagliacci and Aida. A good voice is like a fine Bordeaux, you have to let it mature.” In any case, Calleja’s ambitions are now focused as much on his homeland as on himself.

“Now I have some eminence in Malta, I want to use it in the best way,” he says. “The choir is a good beginning, but there is a real appetite for music and opera here, audiences are growing all the time. What they need is a proper auditorium.” With Malta’s only superstar rooting for them, one senses they won’t have to wait long.

Joseph Calleja appears at the Last Night of the Proms on September 8 (0845 401 5040). His new CD, 'Be My Love’, a tribute to Mario Lanza, is out now on Decca.